The final question which must be addressed in order to understand why the Hague Judgments Project failed is why the EC and its Member States clung to the structure of the October 1999 Preliminary Draft Convention during the Diplomatic Session and were not in general willing to diverge substantially from it.

THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY's INTEREST IN MAINTAINING A BROAD GREEN LIST

As discussed above in Chapter 3, the European bloc had an interest in filling the gap in the rules on international direct jurisdiction left by the 1968 Brussels Convention regarding defendants who were domiciled in a third State.Creating unified rules on international direct jurisdiction on a global level could have helped to create a level playing field for claimants in EC Member States with regard to proceedings against defendants without a domicile in an EC Member State, and foster equal access to justice. It is likely that the EC also had another hidden interest in maintaining a broad green list reflecting the jurisdictional provisions of the 1968 Brussels Convention (or of the proposal for the Brussels I Regulation (hereafter COM (1999) 348 final) intended to replace the Brussels Convention). A Hague Judgments Convention with jurisdictional provisions drafted according to the Brussels regime would have expanded the geographical influence of the European regime to a considerable extent: a judgment rendered in one of the EC Member States could have been recognised and declared enforceable on a potentially worldwide scale under the Hague Judgments Convention if the judgment had fulfilled its requirements for recognition and enforcement.